This paper is dedicated to weighted composition semigroups on spaces of continuous functions and their subspaces. We consider semigroups induced by semiflows and semicocycles on Banach spaces $$\mathcal {F}(\Omega )$$
F
(
Ω
)
of continuous functions on a Hausdorff space $$\Omega $$
Ω
such that the norm-topology is stronger than the compact-open topology like the Hardy spaces, the weighted Bergman spaces, the Dirichlet space, the Bloch type spaces, the space of bounded Dirichlet series and weighted spaces of continuous or holomorphic functions. It was shown by Gallardo-Gutiérrez, Siskakis and Yakubovich that there are no non-trivial norm-strongly continuous weighted composition semigroups on Banach spaces $$\mathcal {F}(\mathbb {D})$$
F
(
D
)
of holomorphic functions on the open unit disc $$\mathbb {D}$$
D
such that $$H^{\infty }\subset \mathcal {F}(\mathbb {D})\subset \mathcal {B}_{1}$$
H
∞
⊂
F
(
D
)
⊂
B
1
where $$H^{\infty }$$
H
∞
is the Hardy space of bounded holomorphic functions on $$\mathbb {D}$$
D
and $$\mathcal {B}_{1}$$
B
1
the Bloch space. However, we show that there are non-trivial weighted composition semigroups on such spaces which are strongly continuous w.r.t. the mixed topology between the norm-topology and the compact-open topology. We study such weighted composition semigroups in the general setting of Banach spaces of continuous functions and derive necessary and sufficient conditions on the spaces involved, the semiflows and semicocycles for strong continuity w.r.t. the mixed topology and as a byproduct for norm-strong continuity as well. Moreover, we give several characterisations of their generator and their space of norm-strong continuity.